Urban Terror HD Won't Be Open Source Anymore

Urban Terror is an open source first person shooter(FPS) game powered by the ioquake3 engine which originally started out as a Quake 3 mod. In a recent blog post, developers of the game have made it clear that, future releases of Urban Terror will no longer be distributed as an open source GPL game.

Urban Terror HD Moving Away from Open Source
Urban Terror is definitely one among the most popular FPS games available in Linux and it was open source as well. But things are changing.

According to Urban Terror developers, extensive work has been made towards the next major release, Urban Terror 4.2, with significant improvements that includes better maps and visuals, new graphics renderer and so on. However, few days go, Urban Terror developers announced one of the most important changes they have ever made. Urban Terror will no longer be distributed as an open-source game under GPL license.

Urban Terror 4.2 is so heavily improved and modified that it won't be even called as version 4.2. Instead, the game is going to be renamed as "Urban Terror HD". Renaming to Urban Terror HD is one big change but nothing compared to the decision to move away from being an open source software.

According to Phoronix, Urban Terror developers have also been working out an anti-cheat implementation and there is talk that Urban Terror HD will no longer going to be available for free(as in free beer) in the future. Even more unclear are the details about the platforms they are going to support. [via Phoronix]